Memory up close: Memory studies in Australia

Abstract

This special issue was first conceived of over dinner in a New Zealand cafe in London, on a warm summer night in July 2010. During that evening, it emerged that we’d both already been thinking about the issues we raise here for some time. Rosanne, a US citizen, and now Australian citizen, who has lived and worked in Australia since the 1990s, had co-edited a book on World Memory (Bennett and Kennedy, 2003). Susannah, at that point a UK citizen working in the United Kingdom and with a fellowship in Australia, was in the midst of running a project on memory in national contexts and had recently spoken on what she sees as the thorny politics driving both memory’s mobility and theories of transnational memory (Radstone, 2011). Later that evening, we were joined by another contributor to this issue, Felicity Collins, who arrived hot foot from a symposium in Dublin on disputed memory in Australia and Ireland (Holmes and Ward, 2011). Looking back, it’s hard not to notice how our coming together – even in the choice of a New Zealand cafe in London – condensed many of the issues that pulse through this special issue. We knew that our connections were through memory research and through Australia. But knowing that didn’t reveal what, if anything, might be denoted by the coupling of Australia with both memory and memory studies. There in London, in the context of theories of the transnational as they were bearing in on memory studies and as they were present – embodied, even – around our table, this special issue had its genesis. That evening, we began to make plans for a symposium,1 bringing together leading memory researchers from across Australia, and it was during that event that we made plans for this volume. The title of our special issue – Memory Studies in Australia – describes its contents more or less accurately, but aims to provoke, too. Our starting point – self-evidently – is our belief that there’s something significant to be learnt from bringing together this carefully commissioned collection of memory studies research in Australia. But what might that be? After all, general questions of the pertinence of the national notwithstanding, isn’t Australia generally regarded – as one of our contributors pithily put it – as just a ‘small’ country, situated beyond anywhere that matters? And isn’t it just plain retrograde, anachronistic or even overly nationalistic to talk about memory studies in